Salvatore Wm. Delle Palme is a tech startup veteran, pro poker player, creative entrepreneur, devoted husband, and father of three.
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Even in his youth in Ottawa in the 1990s, Sal defied expectations and questioned the established order. His first big career move came at 14 when he quit baseball to sell ice cream from a bike cooler and flowers door-to-door.
After years of performing music on the street, working in direct sales, call centres, music retail, and dealing blackjack on a graveyard shift, he discovered a talent and passion for poker that set him on a new course. At 22, with his life savings of $11,000, Sal transformed his poker hobby into a ten-year pro career. He played all across North America, rising to some of the highest stakes in Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
During this time, he also studied web design and launched arts media projects such as Screw The Status Quo! (2009) and Zouch Magazine & Misc., which resulted in a modest exit in 2012. These early ventures were small acts of rebellion against a system that prized convention over creativity.
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In 2012, Sal became an early adopter of Bitcoin, which was more than just a financial innovation; it was like a portal to a world of financial and tech knowledge that he lacked, given that his limited post-secondary studies focused on Philosophy and Art.
In 2013, he became one of Canada’s first-ever Bitcoin traders, executing retail transactions in Downtown Toronto for Xagau. Next, he joined a small seed-stage startup based in San Francisco called Kraken, and for over three years helped the company by running social media and customer support, weather a brutal crypto winter and successfully scale from a dozen to approx. 50 employees. Kraken went on to grow into one of crypto’s biggest brands, generating $1.5b in revenue in 2024.
In 2018, subsequent to a hiatus and a successful return to cash game poker, Sal founded and hosted Hamilton Blockchain, the first-ever blockchain meetups in the Hamilton area featuring expert speakers on crypto tech, security, regulation, trading, investing, entrepreneurship, and NFTs.
In 2019, he shifted his focus to investing and personal creative projects, eventually launching Artfunder to support indie artists in the emerging creator economy.
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Driven by a desire to promote tech with the potential to disrupt corrupt and degenerate power structures, Sal’s vision combines a techno-optimist cyberpunk ethos with a strong humanist perspective. He champions free markets, individual freedoms, and limited government while ultimately embracing a neoclassical liberal political philosophy that requires government policy to explicitly and continually raise the standard of living for the poorest and most marginalized in society.
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In 2025, Sal launched SUPERCYCLE, a platform delivering no-nonsense, high-signal news briefs on crypto and decentralized AI trends.
